A humbled Tony Blair returned to Britain on Saturday to face Labour party critics after a voter backlash against the invasion of Iraq led to an unprecedented trouncing in local elections.
Blair's aides tried to portray the defeat in the most favourable light while the prime minister attended the funeral of former US President Ronald Reagan in Washington.
But more than 460 Labour officials were voted out of local government in Thursday's poll, and Blair will have to convince Labour parliamentarians they will not suffer the same fate in a general election likely next year.
"I'd like to say I'm sorry to the (local) councillors who've lost their seats," Blair told reporters in Washington before heading home. "I think Iraq has been a shadow over our support."
But he said he was determined to stay on, and expected Iraq to become less of a liability as the UN endorsement of a plan to restore sovereignty should improve the situation there.
Blair decided to join the United States in invading Iraq in March last year despite strong opposition within his own party.
Ruling parties in Britain often do poorly in local elections but bounce back and win national polls. But for the first time, the Labour Party did not even come second, its 26 percent of the vote leaving it behind both the Conservatives and the anti-war Liberal Democrats, traditionally the smaller third party.
Labour still has a large majority in parliament, and party rules make it hard to remove Blair as party leader. But Labour lawmakers' fears for their jobs have led to calls for a new leader to fight the next election.
The ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Gordon Brown has been waiting in the wings.
Most Labour leaders, while acknowledging a need to learn from what Blair's deputy John Prescott called a "kicking", fell shy of calling for Blair's scalp.
"This is not a time to question the future of Tony Blair," Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell told BBC television. "The decisions Tony Blair has taken are decisions that I as a cabinet member have supported and that the whole cabinet has supported."
But former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit the cabinet in protest at the plans for war, said voters who quit Labour over Iraq would stay away as long as Blair led it.
Clare Short, another outspoken Labour rebel, said voters were punishing Blair because his party couldn't punish him.
"What we did in Iraq has brought disgrace and dishonour on Britain around the world. As Tony Blair won't change the policy, the only way to make a correction is for him to step aside from the leadership," she told the Evening Standard newspaper.
The one bright spot for Labour was the re-election of its popular candidate Ken Livingstone as London's mayor. Even that was of dubious value to Blair, as the maverick Livingstone had led massive street protests against the Iraq war.
Blair expects to face more bad news on Sunday when delayed results of Britain's European Parliament vote are released.
Opinion polls suggest fringe parties opposed to deeper integration with the European Union will do well. That may hurt the opposition Conservatives more than Blair in the short term, but bodes ill for him in the year ahead.
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